But he was not quick enough to be out of earshot of the conductor. As the vehicle moved off again the conductor was still on the platform looking back at them, no longer hurling abuse now he knew who the culprits were but shaking his capped head at the antics of the lunatic Chinese who smiled serenely, bafflingly, maddeningly at him as they disappeared into the specks far down the road.
And indeed there was an impression of invincible eccentricity about the little group now re-forming on the pavement for the next stage of its journey. Chen appeared unremarkable enough in his black trousers and brown padded jacket; although his trilby hat was a bit odd as accessory to these. The girls, however, having no uniform to provide them with an approximate sartorial guideline, nor a job to get them out of the house, had become rather disorganized about their clothing. One relaxation of convention had led to another. Both were wearing thin tunic suits in a tiny floral pattern (unfortunately no longer interchangeable as Mui was getting quite comfortable in her figure). Over these summery suits each was wearing a baggy cardigan of Chen’s. Lily’s was grey with walnut leather buttons, Mui’s olive-green in a chunky knit with transparent plastic toggles. Mui almost filled her woollen but, having shorter arms than her brother-in-law, had been forced to roll the sleeves back several times. Lily, on the other hand, found Chen’s sleeves too short, uncomfortably so, even with the cuffs rolled down, so that the top part of the garment acted as a strait-jacket, riding up under the armpits and exposing her wrists and a substantial length of her shapely forearm, while around her slender waist the cardigan’s elasticated bottom had concertinaed in a thick roll rather like the domed edge of a toadstool. Lily’s flat shoes – the ones she wore to the shops – were being repaired, which had left her with the choice of house-slippers or a pair of slightly longer than ankle-length Wellington boots (in the vernacular ‘larbah boot’), relic of typhoon seasons on the flooded barrack roof in Hong Kong, into which she had finally thrust her narrow, sockless feet. Mui had commandeered a pair of Chen’s size 7 shoes, laceless unhappily, in which her own size 3 feet floundered like landed fish. She proceeded with a circular, scuffling motion, reminding Lily of the way Father had advanced on his opponents in order simultaneously to hook their leading leg and protect his own groin from counter flick-kicks. Despite the three pairs of her sister’s socks she was wearing (which was why Lily’s bare feet were now rapidly blistering) every now and then a shoe would detach itself from Mui’s foot and Lily would fear for Man Kee in his sling on his aunt’s back – though Lily had no doubts Mui would fall heroically forward on her face if the need arose.
Now they set off to the Underground station from which they would take a train to the railway station from which they would take a final bus to their destination. Man Kee dozed placidly in Mui’s back, waking briefly as the train clattered through an eerie, spark-lit crossroad of tunnels and regarding his father with a large, incurious and unblinking eye before falling asleep again. Chen was grateful for this. The boy seemed quieter these days, or was it just that he was seeing him in the day?
On the BR train, where they had an entire compartment to themselves, Chen positioned himself near the window, ready to spring tiger-like on Mui should she succumb to temptation in the shape of the alarm cord. Irresponsible of the English authorities to put it so conveniently at hand; it was far too easy to pull. Also, it bore great resemblance to the bus cord which one might legitimately, under certain circumstances, pull. The red handle on the Underground was far less ambiguous, especially as this train kept stopping and starting at a variety of small stations in response to a pinging clearly audible in the compartment. But Mui, hunched forwards with Man Kee on her back, chin cupped in hands, was looking eagerly out of the streaky window. Chen began to relax. The girls woke him at the station. He pretended he had just closed his eyes.
The premises, directly opposite the bus stop, were being gutted. Shattered glass lay perilously on the pavement. Two windows had been knocked into one. The new front had been daubed with smears of white paint to prevent people accidentally sticking their arms through it. Through a clear square of glass they could see snakes of bunched electrical coils dropping from the ceiling.
Workmen came out, scraping their heavy boots on the plank floor. Chen was wary of this class of Englishman, crossing to the other side of the road on his way home from work as they spilled out of the pubs long after their statutory closing time, he used to think with fear and resentment. Mui and Lily stared at them with a blatant curiosity which, Chen knew, could offend. The English were peppery, often manufacturing pretexts for anger where none reasonably existed: a stare held too long, failure to meet their round eye at all. The girls’ exposure to this kind of thing had not been as thoroughgoing as his, he thought protectively. He waved them away. ‘Let’s go.’ The workmen seemed, fortunately, to be ignoring them so far. Mui had poked her head through the door and was inspecting the interior. Curls of wood-shavings covered the wood floor. There was a smell of fresh putty.
‘Brother-in-law, this is too big for us. We are small people only.’
Chen, too, had been taken aback by the properness of the place, the presence of the workmen and the wholesale repairs they were making. This was not what he had been looking for. He wanted a more cautious, less obtrusive start. A place like this could be unlucky; it was arrogant, defying fate. This could be a large restaurant. Mui, although over-awed, was still curious. Chen took her by the arm and drew her outside. The workmen were brewing tea over a primus, stirring gobs of condensed milk into the pan which contained the boiling tea. When the Chens were twenty yards down the street the workmen began to whoop and stamp. Chen hurried his women on.
‘What do the gwai lo sing, Brother-in-law?’
‘They are singing songs, Mui.’
‘What songs, Brother-in-law?’
‘Their own songs, Mui.’
‘Ah.’
‘Don’t look back, Lily.’
Lily, however, was not to be so easily denied. She turned round and with an arm through Mui’s so she would not crash into a lamp post began to walk with short steps in the same direction as the others facing backwards (one of the exercises she had performed with Father in the courtyard).
‘Lily!’ Chen whirled round, scandalised. But now he was also able to see that the noise the workmen were making had nothing to do with them at all but involved one of their own number who had met with an accident (Chen thought it likely from his behaviour) involving the upsetting of hot liquid, in all likelihood tea, on to a sensitive part of his anatomy. Lily tittered. Chen found nothing amusing about the man’s mishap, faan gwai or not. In fact he felt distinct masculine solidarity with him. Did the girls realize how painful this could be? Perhaps they knew and didn’t care? Knew and gloated? Chen glanced at the nape of Lily’s graceful neck, one of the few parts of her body that had up till now always pleased him. He must spend more time with Man Kee, he decided, staring into that infant’s open, phlegmatic eye. He couldn’t approve of all this female influence.
They had reached the end of the road. Chen did not want to retrace their steps and took them down a smaller street on the right. From here they reached the main road again which, on a whim, Chen crossed. Loyally, the girls followed, though Lily’s feet were by now really quite painful in her Wellingtons and Mui’s back was aching from the weight of Man Kee’s sling.
It became apparent that the main road formed an unofficial kind of boundary. The side they were now on was older, more dilapidated than the north side, a change which took place with startling swiftness. They had been walking for three minutes and already the houses were visibly decayed. They passed a derelict terrace, the doors and windows covered with corrugated-tin sheets; through rusted holes in the crinkled metal they could see grass growing in the roofless rooms. There was still a sofa in one of the ruined houses and its springs had burst out of the rotten cloth like a robot’s innards. This was more like it, Chen thought with satisfaction; they would start here. It was ideal. Hardly anyone would come to the shop! Stray business, that was. Obviously one needed a modicum of local custom to survive. He had a little money left. Lily had also surprised him by revealing the existence of a fragrant hoard in the tea tin. At first pleased, he had later been unsettled by this evidence of his wife’s capacity to sacrifice immediate gratification and defer it for future providential uses, and even more upsetting, to carry it out secretly without his discovering. Not that there was anything sneaky or reprehensible about it. Nevertheless, he could hardly believe Lily had found a margin on the house-keeping. Whole new regions of the female psyche, not only unexplored but their existence hitherto unsuspected, opened before him. Chen did his best to put the whole thing out of his mind as quickly as possible. If there was more to Lily than he had ever imagined he did not, at this comparatively late stage of things, want to know. Could she, for instance, have manipulated him into directly raising the question of a move? When all along it had been she who wanted it? Had she known all the time and been laughing at him? Chen looked at her talking innocently with Mui (why were they both limping?) and frowned. What deceptions and secrets lay behind the childishly smooth skin of those faces? Chen decided to give Lily enough room to manoeuvre in future – for both their sakes.
They had now arrived at an open space, a demolition site, bounded by tall, braced buildings on two sides. In the middle there was an untended fire blazing. Chen led his party across the scattered bricks and tins. Lily deliberately walked through the large puddles, pleased with this chance to turn her boots to use. There had been, she now remembered, a small leak in the left boot at ankle height but time seemed to have plugged it. Fearing for Man Kee on such treacherous terrain, she took him from Mui and slung him on her own back. Mui, who was, indeed, experiencing some difficulties keeping her shoes on, fell behind the others. Lily and Chen approached the fire, which was much larger than appeared from a distance and was composed of rags, planks, straw packing, and half a car tyre which was giving off fumes and black smoke. There was no indication who had built it unless it was the English boys, throwing green bottles against the buttresses at the far end of the site. They had been hidden by smoke. But wouldn’t they have been poking the fire with sticks? Lily turned to Mui to share a Kwangsi memory but she had vanished. A moment later Mui materialized through a pall of smoke, coughing and red-eyed. The wind had changed! ‘It’s not good to rub your eyes, Mui. Let them water.’
This piece of well-meant advice did not seem to be at all appreciated.
Mui scuffed resentfully after Chen, ploughing straight through a pile of beer tins and sending them clattering against fallen masonry and into puddles, just like a gwai lo hooligan. By the time she had rejoined Chen on the road her shoes were white with the ash from previous fires which lay thickly on this side of the site. As they turned the corner Lily took a last look at the fire, still burning in isolation, with nobody so much as throwing one extra plank on it or even enjoying its heat. How strange the English were, how indifferent, how careless of the consequences of their own deeds! And as for their attitude to their old people it was nothing less than shameful neglect, a national disgrace. With the image of the fire and the plight of the English aged now inextricably merged in her mind – both to do somehow with loneliness and a shirking of responsibilities as well as inevitable physical extinction – Lily wandered abstractedly down the road, barely listening to Chen. (Perhaps the fumes of the fire had poisoned her without her being aware of it.)
Each of the party was now locked into his or her own thoughts, no longer functioning as a single unit with a common purpose, the girls’ sense of their own individuality reinforced by nagging little corporal pains: Lily vicariously indignant on behalf of others less fortunate than herself, dimly conscious of pinched, raw toes; Mui regretting having ever implanted the idea of a move into her sister’s and brother-in-law’s heads, sidling along like a crippled land-crab and wishing she was in front of her television. Only Chen was happy, walking on a cushion of air in this suburban wilderness where one street led into its twin, the whole area having the effect of a maze through its uniformity. Chen chattered excitedly to Lily. Here was where they should settle; this was perfect. Lily wasn’t altogether happy but she didn’t want to curb Husband’s enthusiasm at this stage. ‘You know best, Husband,’ and she left the decision in his hands.
When they got home Lily levered her Wellingtons off with difficulty and – a stroke of inspiration – soaked her sore feet in what was left of the mixture she had bottled for Husband’s flu. So eager to dose others, it was the first time she had tried her own medicine. Of course, it was the least objectionable way of taking it. As it turned out, the mixture, at first astringently refreshing on hot blistered skin, then warming and soothing, proved a panacea. Or (Lily pondered later) had her memory failed her? Had she been, in fact, administering to Husband not Father’s patented internal draught but the liniment he had used to toughen the calluses on his already formidably armoured knuckles? At any rate her feet gave her no trouble the next day, while Mui was still limping. Rather ostentatiously, Lily thought.
Two days later Chen went to reconnoitre the area again. He insisted on going solo and was surprised at the lack of resistance from the girls, contradictory creatures that they were. The workmen were having another tea-break when he passed them. What incorrigible idlers! Crossing the main road into the ruined district but going in another direction this time, he found what he wanted. Within the week he was able to present the girls with the accomplished fact: premises vacant and ready for occupation in two weeks.
William Boyd
[1952-]
William Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana. The son of a physician and a schoolteacher, he spent his early years in Ghana and Nigeria before leaving, in 1961, for a boarding school in Scotland. Boyd later attended the University of Nice and the University of Glasgow. In 1975 he married Susan Wilson, a publishing company publicity director, and in that same year he began a postgraduate programme at Jesus College in Oxford. In 1981 Boyd became a television critic for the New Statesman. He also worked as a fiction reviewer for the London Sunday Times and as a lecturer in English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, before turning to writing full-time.
Boyd’s first novel was the widely praised A Good Man in Africa (1981), a comic romp that depicts the sex and alcohol-soaked mishaps of British diplomat Morgan Leafy. The novel earned Boyd comparisons with Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis, and received the Whitbread Literary Award for best first novel and the 1982 Somerset Maugham Award. In 1981 Boyd also published a collection of stories called On the Yankee Station. In the following year his second novel, An Ice-Cream War, won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. The novel is set in East Africa during the First World War and uses interweaving narratives to expose the senselessness of combat. 1984 saw the publication of Stars and Bars, a novel which follows the misadventures of a displaced Englishman as he bumbles through New York City and America’s Deep South.
The New Confessions (1987) tells of a Scottish film-maker who, while a prisoner of war during the First World War, decides to adapt French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions to the silent screen. Brazzaville Beach (1990), which won the 1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the McVitie Award, is a structurally complex novel narrated by a young English primatologist working in Africa in the early 1970s. In addition to several screenplays, adaptations, short stories and reviews, Boyd has recently published The Blue Afternoon (1993), a mystery and a love story that spans several decades and countries. It won the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award. His latest published work is The Destiny of Nathalie ‘X’ (1995), a collection of short stories. Boyd currently lives in London and France.
In this autobiographical essay, ‘Fly Away Home’ (1997), Boyd captures the ambivalence of a childhood characterized by arrival and departure. Recalling his experiences as a young boy travelling between England and Africa, he is moved to question his place in both worlds and to examine the true nature of ‘home’.
Fly Away Home
York, Hermes, Argonaut, Stratocruiser, Superconstellation, Britannia, Boeing 707, VC 10 … The story of my early encounters with England is a small history of aviation. I do not remember the York, a development of the Lancaster bomber, I believe, but in 1952 – the year I was born – my flying life began, in a Hermes. I was born in March in a military hospital in Accra, the capital of the Gold Coast. Four months later I was carried up the steps to the waiting Hermes to begin my first flight from my native land back to the place my parents came from. The Hermes followed the York on the first passenger services from Gold Coast to London, making a series of short hops across the great protruding bulge of western Africa – Accra, Lagos, Kano, Tripoli – before crossing the Mediterranean to Madrid, Rome or Frankfurt and then on to London. The whole journey took seventeen hours.
I do remember the Argonaut quite well, however, a British version of the DC6, a four-engined prop plane that did not owe anything to Second World War precursors and was the first to make the trans-Sahara overfly routine (if one discounts the truly terrifying turbulence), and was thus able to cut the time of the West Africa to London trip substantially. We would land in Kano in northern Nigeria to refuel before setting off on the long leg over the desert to Tripoli. Kano airport was so fly-infested that the airport buildings were proofed with mosquito wire. Vultures perched on the control tower. We always crossed the Sahara at night (perhaps at the level the planes flew in those days the turbulence made it impassable when the sun was up) and we would arrive at Tripoli as dawn broke. For this reason Tripoli airport always seemed dramatic and somewhat disturbing to me, as I recall: its hangars were colandered from Second World War shrapnel and in the pale light you could see cannibalised hulks of Italian bombers of the same era rusting mysteriously in the thin blond grass that fringed the runways. Beyond the perimeter fence camels grazed … There was still one more stop to be made in mainland Europe before we cruised over the English Channel to land at London airport – as Heathrow was always quaintly referred to in those days.
The Stratocruiser represented the ultimate in luxury. Twin-decked, with a glassy, round, bulbous nose, the plane tried to simulate the elegance of the Pullman cars in transcontinental express trains. Seats were arranged in fours, pairs facing each other. Above our heads was a reach-me-down bunk bed for children. On the lower deck was a small bar accessed by a tight spiral staircase, which I remember my parents descending for a cocktail before the meal was served – a side of roast beef on a silver trolley, the steward carving slices off it as if he were for all the world in the Savoy Grill and not 20,000 feet above the dark wadis and sand seas of the endless Sahara.
All these aeroplanes and their successors – the Britannia, the VC10 and so on – were in the livery of BOAC – the British Overseas Airways Corporation – crisp white and navy blue and badged with the famous speedbird logo (now long vanished). As I grew older and became conscious of our annual trips back to Britain on leave, the planes, and by extension the company, came to represent the country by proxy, as if a little segment of Britain had been sent out to the colonies to fetch us back to the motherland. It was a kind of idealized metaphor, I suppose – the smart modern planes and their smart modern crew luring us on board with their smiles and their trays of boiled sweets – showing us what we had left behind, reminding us of our good fortune in being able to return.
My early experience of air travel instilled in me a love of flying, of airports and all the accoutrements of aviation which has not left me to this day. How could such an introduction to flight, at such an impressionable age, and with such magnificent ambassadors, not fail to entrance? As children our idea of a treat was to be driven from home to Accra airport to look at the BOAC plane. One runway, one uneven expanse of tarmac apron, a control tower, a few hangars, some low sheds doubling as immigration and customs, arrival and departure halls, Accra airport was modest and unassuming in the extreme. Across the road from the airport was the airport hotel, called The Lisbon for some forgotten reason, a single-storied wooden building with a wide veranda. On Saturday nights a highlife band would play and the more daring young expatriate couples would come there to dance. Like all airport hotels in Africa, it effortlessly maintained a louche and faintly racy ambience. We children would take our drinks – our Fanta and Cokes – and go and stand at the wood paling fence and stare at the silver giant, propellers stilled, parked on the tarmac. Fuel bowsers and generators hummed, linked trolleys bouncing with luggage trundled from the departure lounge, engineers and cleaners ran up and down the wheeled steps set against the doorways. Then came the crew, then came the long lines of passengers. Doors were closed, propellers turned, the plane was freed from its various appurtenances and it taxied to the end of the runway.
To see it lift off and climb into the dusty evening air was both exhilarating and melancholy, emotions perhaps not fully comprehended then but more easily analysed now. It has to be understood that in the 1950s, certainly from an African perspective, these tremendous aeroplanes, and the world they both encompassed and conjured up, were for us a vision of immense and modern glamour and at the same time, like all people being left behind, we felt a sense of flatness and disappointment lingering as we returned to the car and were driven home, counting the weeks and months until it would be our turn to cross that cracked, uneven piste towards the blue and white flying machine and be carried away by it also, cosseted and nourished, across the desert to Europe, to England, homeward.
As you mounted the steps towards the door, almost swooning with excitement, the first impression, aside from the stewardess (a figure of unearthly exoticism), was olfactory. The smell of the fly spray that was liberally pumped throughout the plane’s interior prior to takeoff was both sweet and oddly choking. It was a smell replicated nowhere else in my range of nasal memory – part marzipan, part cough medicine, part liqueur, part candy, part liniment … I could not place it: our fly sprays at home did not smell remotely the same. But whatever it was, whatever brand it was or compound of chemical meeting unnatural fabric in a confined space, the BOAC version was potent and palpable. It was always, for me at least, the first smell of England. It was a kind of Rubicon; as you stepped over the threshold and were directed down the aisle, your lungs were filled with this curious reek. You soon became used to it but it signalled that your journey home had truly begun.
And yet my real home was in West Africa, in the Gold Coast – which in 1957 became Ghana. Until my tenth year I spent only summers in Britain, almost always in Scotland. But my parental home was in Ghana, and so were my bedroom, my things, my school, my friends. Scotland was where my relatives lived, where we rented a house and my parents caught up with their families. We were always in transit, welcomed but always ‘just visiting’. The real business of my life lay at the end of another plane journey in the reverse direction. And the comparative brevity of the annual leave never allowed us fully to integrate, to take things for granted, to become au fait with the latest fads and fashions. Little details remind me now of that sense of apartness. I felt ill at ease walking past school playgrounds, always stared at. Why wasn’t this boy (me) at school? (One could sense the unspoken question.) How were my sullenly curious coevals to know that African school holidays did not coincide with the British? If I had not detoured, I crossed the street, head down. I never felt comfortable with children of my age group en masse. I remember my father too, a man of status and real importance on the university campus, where he ran a hospital and health clinics responsible for 20,000 people, fumbling like a new immigrant with his unfamiliar change as he tried to buy a newspaper in Edinburgh. You could sense the newsagent’s impatience building as my father picked and prodded hesitantly at a palmful of coins. I possessed also a vague embarrassment about my clothes. The shorts and sandals and shirts made from local tie-dyed cloth – which were wholly unexceptional in Ghana – seemed eccentric, not to say bizarre, in breezy St Andrews or the High Street in Peebles. I had no long trousers at all, and how I coveted my first pair of jeans – finally bought at the age of nine with an aunt in a department store in Birmingham – at last, knees covered, I might not stand out from the crowd. Needless to say, I never felt like this in Africa, where I roamed about the countryside, cycled through the streets and boulevards of the enormous, sprawling campus, possessing the place so thoroughly, so intimately, that such unreflecting familiarity has never been reproduced, no matter where I have subsequently lived. I knew paths through the bush, short cuts through servants’ quarters. I knew where the biggest mangoes grew, the best spot to catch pythons, what pie dogs to avoid, how to eat fufu, who would sell you a single stick of chewing gum, what were the rules and penalties of a complicated game involving the spinning of hollow snail shells … My life in Africa up until the age of ten was a modest but genuine idyll and its basic elements will be familiar to anyone who has grown up in the tropics – the child, the white child, still possessed a form of tolerant laissez-passer denied the adult. We were unnoticed, or barely noticed, everywhere – which, when freedom to come and go is all you ask, is the best and most sincere form of welcome.
And then June came round and the rainy season threatened and it was time to go on leave. BOAC would send one of its planes to fetch us and the strange and exciting process that led to our landfall in England would begin. Sunset in Kano, the lurching roller-coaster of the night flight across the Sahara, dawn in Tripoli, morning in Madrid or Rome – finally peering through clearing clouds at the green patchwork of English fields and the occasional wink of sunburst from a car’s windscreen. London airport. More low wooden buildings. Lino and Formica. Tall blue policemen. Pale pasty faces. Strange accents … And somewhere, deep inside me, the private hollow of fear and insecurity that all aliens (however legal) carry within them. My passport was British, so why was I uneasy?
